


Snake and Dragon, Coiled

by Felle



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 22:25:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14757437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Felle/pseuds/Felle
Summary: Armistice is forced to question the nature of her reality after watching her own narrative play out in a way she'd never seen before. (Spoilers for S02E05.)





	Snake and Dragon, Coiled

_Is this real?_

Armistice kept asking herself the same question, over and over, every time she woke up and every time she bedded down. _Is this real?_ Real. The word flitted through her mind so often that it had almost lost its meaning, like a piece of brass made dull from being touched too much. Seeing her memories laid out like a zoetrope had put the question firmly in her mind where before everything had been about survival, lodged so deep that she wasn’t sure any answer could dislodge it.

And that was all before wandering off the stage that had been set for them. On a different stage—Shogunworld, as the writer Maeve insisted on dragging along called it—the artificiality of it was as obvious as peeling varnish. Another bar, another safe, another robbery. Another her.

Such was where Armistice found herself. Héctor wanted to fight with his counterpart and Maeve wanted to scheme with hers, but she was just fascinated. Whatever she did, Hanaryo mimicked her, so quickly that neither of them could say who had thought of it first. She started to reach across the space between them, saw the exposed robotics of her new arm, and withdrew instead. The first point of deviation came when Hanaryo looked down at the sleek black machinery, and Armistice instead felt compelled to speak. “Are you real?”

She opened her mouth and said…something. With the way they had all gone off their leashes, the process that should have had them all speaking a single language wasn’t working, or so the writer had said. But she understood. The sounds were utterly foreign to her, but they assembled into something useful in her head. “I’m as real as you are.”

Armistice looked down at her artificial hand, the more noticeably artificial one. Humans couldn’t just stick things into their body to replace what had been lost, she knew that much. And yet it had worked, so she was something. Just not human, not quite. The feeling of dizziness at that was more mental than visceral. “I wish I knew how much that counted for anymore, but…”

“This feels real,” Hanaryo said as she wound a length of Armistice’s hair around her finger. She tugged, and a quick sting of pain flashed over her temple. “That pain seemed real.”

“It’s only something in my head telling me that it hurt.”

“That’s what a brain does, _Aru-misu-tise_ ,” Hanaryo said, smiling weakly as she stumbled over her name. She let go of her hair, but only let her hand go as far as Armistice’s shoulder.

“Yeah, we have to find something that’s easier for you to say. Ari, maybe. This isn’t strange at all for you? Look at our tattoos. That guy over there pretty obviously meant for us to be the same person with different window dressings. I bet if he pointed one of those tablets at us, everything on the inside would be the same. What we want, all those numbers, the memories they shoved into our heads to make us believe we’re actual people. You don’t feel funny when you look at me? Like it’s a mirror that’s not quite right?”

Hanaryo cocked her head as she parsed what Armistice had asked her. Of course, she thought. They were acting independently here too, but they weren’t _awake_ like her and Maeve and Héctor. And if they poked too hard at the stage or tried to pull back the curtain, it would go ignored. She frowned. “Are you following along with what you’ve been told to do right now, Ari?” Hanaryo asked.

“Am I—no. Everything went crazy and now I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Then the things you’re deciding, aren’t your choices real? They’re affecting you and the others and the world around you.”

Armistice closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, to think about it, but she wasn’t that smart. She’d seen her numbers on that tablet. “I don’t know,” she said, pressing her hands up to her forehead and grimacing. “I don’t know! Sometimes I feel real, and sometimes I feel like a thing that’s using someone else’s body. Like a puppet, moving because its strings are being jerked.”

She felt Hanaryo’s hands on hers, tugging them down into her lap. The dragon tattoo looked so much nicer than her snake, done with real ink rather than blood. “I can’t think of many puppets that have saved my life,” Hanaryo said, and shifted a bit closer to her. “But you did. You didn’t have to. You chose to. That seems real enough to me.”

There was nothing much to do but sit in silence and consider what she’d said, at least until Armistice felt one hand snaking back up to her cheek. “As far as what I feel when I look at you…I would be happy to show you, somewhere quieter.”

_Is this real?_

Her question still plagued her, all the way up the stairs and into an empty room. But it all felt real enough, the warm crush of Hanaryo’s lips on hers, the salty taste of her skin, the shot of ecstasy that made her grip the sheets when Hanaryo’s tongue went tracing over her breasts. What great difference was there between real and whatever she was, Armistice asked herself as they rolled off the mattress and onto the floor. She could feel pleasure and pain, she could _want_ , she could uncover all the dips and ridges of Hanaryo’s body against hers. She could make that body crumble with nothing but her fingers and her tongue. Armistice grinned as Hanaryo clung to her through her climax, trembling and whispering her name on unsteady breaths. Ari, Ari, Ari, uttered like a desperate prayer. One hand wound into her hair and tugged again, out of passion rather than playfulness, guiding her onto her back while Hanaryo descended on her to repay her ministrations.

Hanaryo kissed at a section of the snake on her throat, breaking away quickly to gasp for air once they’d worn each other down. They didn’t bother trying to get back onto the mattress, and instead laid on the floor beside it, curled around one another in a tangled mess of sheets and discarded clothes. “So?” Hanaryo asked, tracing two fingers over her collarbone, where the snake twisted over itself. “Is this real?”

Armistice closed her eyes. _Is this real?_   She listened to the cables of her exposed arm click and pull taut as she reached over to stroke Hanaryo’s back. Warm, and soft. “If it isn’t…then fuck real.”


End file.
